Tools
Tools used in the job Being an IT technician, you will require software and hardware tools to make your job easier within the job role, effectively improving your time keeping and productivity. a lot of tools will basically do the same thing which is scan a network and give you details and tell you if there are any issues or flaws in it. Virtualisation Virtualisation is a method of computing in which you create a virtual version of a system e.g. a virtual machine which is a copy of an operating system that can be run from other machines with more control like pausing it and deleting it easily. Another form of virtualisation is cloud storage which is a virtual form of physical storage. Disk Imaging Disk imaging is a method of backup where a snapshot of a drive is created and stored onto the drive. This snapshot contains all the information and it can be altered based on the settings being made. The software can automatically alter the disk image if something is changed on the captured drive to ensure an always reliable backup Remote access and asset management Asset management software is a piece of software that can be used to keep track of all systems on the network using it you can monitor what programs are being used on what machine and how much CPU, Memory or disk usage a machine is using. One piece of software that does this is Pulseway. Pulseway also allows you to remotely control other pcs to either quickly help with support or stop something bad from happening. Types of tools During this job you will use many software tools such as antivirus, monitoring tools, recovery tools and management tools. The antivirus tools will be used to scan the network for any malicious files on it that may be there to steal or damage any data. The monitoring tools will be used to monitor the traffic on the network you can use them to see what sites people are going on and how much time they spend on them. Recovery tools are tools that can restore corrupted data on a damaged drive on the system. The final type of tools you will use is management tools these are wheat we use to create limitations and grant access to accounts on the network using these you can filter out sites we don't want staff to be using whilst also allowing accounts that need access to specific software access. Management tools also covers the ticketing software we use to manage requests Some tools used by a system manager ProduKey is a software tool that allows the technician to see what Product keys are installed on that computer, including OS product key. Using this software to salvage product keys can keep the licensing costs down as you can remove old pieces software from Devices before they go to a recycling plant. Certain licensing agreements allow this but do double check this as certain apps only let you use that product key once and locks it to a MAC address. This piece of software would be used when wiping old pcs or when setting up new ones as you can get an overview of which pieces of software have which licenses. ' ' Wireshark is a protocol packet analyser software. It allows for monitoring, network troubleshooting, analysing and packet tracing. This is great to use to trace where packets are going within the network to find connection issues, along with tracing packets entering and leaving the network allowing to trace packet senders within the network. Using this piece of software you can analyse individual packets and unless it has been encrypted easily see the data within. This software would be used when certain pcs or groups of pcs aren’t sending or receiving data correctly It could also be used to analyse the latency of certain parts of the network by timing how long data takes to reach certain machines. Partition Wizard is a piece of a software which allows for cloning, migrating, removal and adding new partitions on a hard drive, thumb drive or any storage device. The software can be booted from a USB stick and take up very little space. It's easy to use as it has a simple menu system to access everything. When migrating/cloning drives, the software will restart the computer when it finishes the initial stage then starts to boot up a custom OS to finish the job. This piece of software may be used when formatting new hard drives by cloning the software onto them with ease. It may also be used to backup certain areas of a drive. Spiceworks is the ticketing system we will use It allows anyone to submit a ticket and have it seen by our support staff tickets can be raised in priority if the problem is recurring or extremely damaging. It also provides a feature where support staff can select how much time they have already spent working on the problem as well as change the due date of the ticket.